Every generation discovers afresh that there’s little about the human
condition the ancients didn’t know

Mental illness is said to cost Britain £70 billion a year. Depression can afflict the very young, or those so old they imagined that physical decay would be their only complaint. On the whole, we have learnt to speak more openly about these problems than previous generations did; that is a good thing, though it does not necessarily make recovery any easier.

Jules Evans, who writes on the front of today’s Weekend section, enjoyed a decade of drug-fuelled hedonism before being diagnosed with depression. He found his consolation and cure in the philosophy of ancient Greece: specifically, in the Stoicist proposition that we should separate what we can control – our thoughts and beliefs – from what we can’t – the economy, the weather, the braking habits of the driver in front of us.

Evans’s passion for his subject reminds us what every generation discovers afresh: that there’s not much about the human condition the ancients didn’t know. Tony Soprano, the sensitive mobster played by the late James Gandolfini, expressed it well after being encouraged to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War by his psychiatrist: “I mean here’s this guy, a Chinese general, wrote this thing 2,400 years ago, and most of it still applies today!” Novice Stoics find the same on first looking into Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. And something similar may help to explain why the Bible remains the best-selling book of all time.